FIGHT! Magazine - Archives » Oct/Nov 2007http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine
Just another WordPress siteThu, 07 Nov 2013 21:36:48 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1An Accidental Case of SUPERSTARDOMhttp://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12708-206/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12708-206/#commentsFri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Mike Chiappettahttp://www.fightmagazine.comThe Cessna glided along the Indiana sky at over 10,000 feet, as Rich Franklin prepared to skydive for the first time. To most, it would have been troublesome that a 12-year-old “expert” had prepared his parachute, a bad omen that one skydiver had already broken an ankle, and downright scary that the only other first-time [...]

]]>The Cessna glided along the Indiana sky at over 10,000 feet, as Rich Franklin prepared to skydive for the first time. To most, it would have been troublesome that a 12-year-old “expert” had prepared his parachute, a bad omen that one skydiver had already broken an ankle, and downright scary that the only other first-time jumper had to go to his reserve chute after his primary failed to open.

But skydiving in those circumstances is exactly what 95% of rational people would never do, which is exactly why Franklin had to do it.

That feeling of butterflies just before the jump, that euphoric nervousness, was the best part; it was what drew him to the edge, leaning out over the side with only a parachute packed by a pre-teen between him and the earth. After a few moments of reveling in his own near-terror, he leaped out, and felt himself fall through the sky. After a few moments of free-falling, he stabilized himself and prepared to deploy his chute. After the initial apprehension, he was perfectly composed; he had faced his fear and won.

And a single thought ran through his mind: that feeling of living on the edge, he needed more of it.

In April 2005, in front of over 3 million viewers watching the sport live on cable television for the first time ever, on the night that mixed martial arts and the UFC became a certified American phenomenon, the main event featured an unlikely participant.

Less than two years earlier, Rich Franklin had been teaching math at OakHillsHigh School in Cincinnati. He had a masters degree in education, was smart and well-spoken, and the UFC anxiously fed his story to the buzzing media.

Everyone wanted to know: how had he gone from the classroom to the cage?

Hard work was the simple reply. But it wasn’t the complete answer.

Franklin had not planned it this way. In truth, he had not planned much at all. He never really set out to become a teacher, it just sort of happened. It was never his goal to be a professional fighter, it just kind of evolved. Sometimes, one thing just leads to another and everything works out. Sometimes, life is that simple even when it seems that there has to be some larger, grander plan.

Usually, when you become a champion of the world at any given athletic endeavor, there is some lead-up to the accomplishment. Perhaps you were gifted from the very beginning like Tiger Woods, a high school phenom like Shaquille O’Neal, or a collegiate superstar like Peyton Manning.

Show me someone who’s stood on top of the world, and I’ll show you how he got there by listing a progression of achievements over time. But what was Franklin’s greatest athletic accomplishment before starting his pro fi ghting career?

“I got to play in a Pee Wee League allstar football game at Riverfront Stadium when I was in fifth or sixth grade,” he says with a laugh after thinking for a few seconds.

How could that be? Did he eschew sports altogether? No, he played football, baseball, soccer, even basketball. He just never managed to distinguish himself in any of them.

Yet on that April 2005 card, the most important card UFC had presented up to that point, there he was, standing across the cage from Ken Shamrock, flirting with athletic stardom.

“I didn’t grow up being a phenomenal athlete,” he says. “Sure, I thought about being famous like everyone else. I thought about being a sports hero, but I never thought it could be a reality. Fame and celebrity status is not something I pursued. It is something bestowed upon me.”

If that sounds like humility, Franklin certainly practices his share. He is a man of faith, a Christian who often wears Psalm 144, Chapter 1 on his T-shirts as his enters the octagon. That passage reads: “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”

It is of course, a perfectly fitting phrase for a mixed martial artist to embrace, but for Franklin, it is more than that. It is his personal truth.

“Quite honestly, I think God had a hand in my success,” he says. “Physically, I bloomed later than others and I was blessed with great coaches and talent, but for me to be so arrogant to take all the credit myself is insane. To think I have completely constructed everything and not think that God had a hand in it…look, things like this don’t happen to people every day.”

It is true to a large degree. When you look at elite-level fighters, most of them have some background upon which they built their careers. But when Franklin began training, he was already 20 years old, after being intrigued by the early UFC pay-per-view broadcasts. His first Jiu-Jitsu coach was a blue belt (just one level above the starting white belt), and when he hit his ceiling there, he and close friend Josh Rafferty (who also later fought in the UFC) taught themselves through instructional tapes.

When you ask him what the defining moment was in his life prior to his pro career, he lists an academic accomplishment.

So how did he get here? He adapted.

It was a trait he would learn early in life. Born in Covington, Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati and across the Ohio River, he moved often after his parents’ divorce when he was just five years old. While he never found himself too far from the neighborhoods he previously inhabited, it still forced him into new and sometimes unwelcome situations.

“My whole life, I’ve viewed myself as a beat-the-odds kind of guy,” he says. “As a child, when you move around a whole bunch, when you come from a single parent home and switch neighborhoods every six months, it’s really difficult to stay on track and to break out of that lifestyle. The goal in my life was to take what I started with and improve upon it.”

By the time he was in HarrisonHigh School, in Ohio, he’d gained a bit more stability, but there was no trace of the “Ace” to come down the road.

In fact, he says he just recently received an email from a former classmate who stumbled upon one of his matches and wrote of her shock in what “Little Richie Franklin” was now doing for a living. Perhaps she’d remembered him from his senior football season, of which Franklin says, “If I tell you I logged thirty minutes of playing time for the whole season, that’s probably overestimating it.”

Though he loved the sport, it was a dead-end. Education, he decided, would be his next destination. And it was there, at the University of Cincinnati, where he would learn his greatest lesson.

Strange, but true: Franklin’s life as a fighter – his life as he knows it – might not have been possible if it had not been for the words of a college professor.

He was a sophomore, taking his first abstract math course. And for the first time in his life, he couldn’t comprehend what he was supposed to be learning. He’d always been a math whiz, but his mind was failing him. He was beaten, defeated not only in the course, but in his academic life. The morning of the final exam, he skipped it, fully intent on dropping out of college and perhaps becoming a fireman.

He stopped by to see his teacher, Dr. Donald Wright. The professor, knowing Franklin had played football in high school, compared his situation to a fourth-quarter, fourth-down while trailing.

“You don’t just quit, do you?” the professor asked him.

“No,” Franklin said.

It was a lesson not about math or academics, but about life. In difficult times, you either surrender, or you fight, and he immediately knew which he would do.

By the time he graduated, he would receive an excellence award from the mathematics department and be on his way to a master’s degree.

Challenges would become a recurring theme from then on. A self-described adrenaline junkie, he has gone cliff-jumping and skydiving and he’s known to drive his four-wheeler a bit too fast. But it’s not only the pursuit for excitement that fuels him, he also believes in bettering himself. He is currently learning to play the drums, as well as learning to speak Portuguese with the help of close friend and fellow UFC fighter Jorge Gurgel.

But of course, the biggest challenge of all was getting into the ring in the first place. Accomplished basically on a dare, Franklin participated in his first amateur fight in Muncie, Indiana, winning easily. He kept fighting because he kept winning, and he kept winning because he was willing to push himself further than the man standing across from him. Within a few years, he was 12-0, had debuted in UFC, and was contemplating fighting full-time.

In passing, he asked his manager, Monte Cox, “What do you think about me fighting full-time?”

Cox replied, “I think you’d be really good at it.”

And he jumped out of the plane again, fully confident that his parachute would open. One fight turned into another, one training session melded into a succession, and he was soon among the best in the world. On June 4, 2005, he battered Evan Tanner into a TKO win to become the UFC middleweight champ. His parachute was golden.

He would hold on to the belt for almost a year-and-a-half, until losing to Anderson Silva last October. The loss dazed him. Afterward, he sat in his MandalayBay hotel room and stared out the window for two days, wondering what went wrong but coming to no real conclusions.

You don’t just quit, do you?

There were still challenges to face, he realized, and as the fog of a single failure began to lift, he got back to work. He’s won his last two bouts, and his championship rematch will take place in October in Cincinnati, the town he still calls home. The pressure will be magnified by the home crowd, and at times, his mind might wander back to doubt.

Then the bell will ring, and as Anderson Silva walks across the octagon to confront him, Rich Franklin will be drawn to the edge again. He’ll feel a hint of nervousness and maybe a twinge of terror – the good kind, like just before you jump out of an airplane.

]]>http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12708-206/feed/0The Beginninghttp://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12696-205/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12696-205/#commentsFri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Big John McCarthyhttp://www.fightmagazine.comMany people want to know what it was like back during the early days of the UFC. What were the fighters like? What did they think about the competition and how they were going to fare during the tournament? I can tell you there are many untold stories, some humorous and some sad. The fighters [...]

]]>Many people want to know what it was like back during the early days of the UFC. What were the fighters like? What did they think about the competition and how they were going to fare during the tournament?

I can tell you there are many untold stories, some humorous and some sad. The fighters really had no idea what they were up against because the show, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, was completely new. There was no introduction, nothing for you to preview, no pay-per-view to watch and then decide if your skills were up to the challenge. If you were a part of the first UFC, they took you, put you into the middle of an Octagonal cage, and gave you the right to use any technique you knew other than eye gouging and biting.

The rules meeting for the first show was a comedy. All of the fighters, each with one representative, were brought into a room to discuss the rules. Now you would think that since there were only three rules the meeting wouldn’t take long, but you would be sorely mistaken. It really wasn’t the rules that were being questioned, but all of the ancillary parts of the event. There was no eye gouging, no biting, and in the first show, no groin shots allowed. Everything else was good. The fights had unlimited five minute rounds, although not one of the eight fights that took place that night lasted the full five minutes. Many of the fighters were not happy with hand wrap limitations; they wanted their hands wrapped, and were told that they could have their hands wrapped up to one inch from the knuckles, but that nothing could go over the knuckles. This caused a huge uproar from some of the fighters. Zane Frazier, Kevin Rosier, and Art Jimmerson were upset because they felt that the rules favored grapplers. They felt that the inability to tape was a safety issue, and that they would not punch as hard for fear that they may cause injury to their hands. I clearly remember Rorion Gracie asking if they would have time to tape their hands in a street fight if someone tried to attack them. The obvious answer was no; he reasoned that since they would still attempt to hit the attacker on the street with an unwrapped hand, then they could do the same here.

One of the biggest sticking points of the meeting was a liability release form all of the fighters were asked to sign. WOW promotions had a form that released them from any responsibility should a fighter be injured or killed. Many of the fighters said they would not sign the form. There were arguments going on back and forth, until Tella Tulli stood up, signed the form, and said, “Anybody here that wants to fight tomorrow night, I’ll see you there.” He then dropped the signed paper on the table and walked out of the room. From that point, all of the other fighters followed suit. All of the arguing over wraps and legal forms seemed to melt away after the big sumo wrestler from Hawaii threw down the gauntlet.

I personally take the blame for screwing up one of the fights at UFC 1. I didn’t start refereeing until UFC 2, but I was at the first show, helping with the training and setup, and I definitely had a negative effect on the outcome of one of the fights. Many people claim that opponents were hand selected for Royce Gracie for the first five UFC events.

Nothing could be further from the truth. After UFC 1, all of the matchups were done with a lottery machine that would spit out a ping-pong ball with a number on it. All of the fighters picked a number from a bowl, and would show what number they had before the lottery machine was turned on. Then, as the balls popped from the lottery machine, the matchups were determined. While this system was not used for UFC 1, only one fighter was hand-picked for Royce. Rorion Gracie picked his brother to face Art Jimmerson in the first round because Jimmerson was a boxer and he wanted to show how effective Gracie Jiu-Jitsu could be against a stand-up striking art. He wanted his style of martial arts to be the victorious style over the most famous Western martial art, boxing.

The problem started the day of the fights. I was sitting in the lobby with my wife, who was dealing with periphery details such as tickets for the event and the party the next day. Art Jimmerson walked up with his wife and started talking with me about the fights. He pointed to me and stated, “You are working out with my opponent, aren’t you?” I told him I was, and he started talking to me about how my man (Royce) never had to deal with a man that could throw real punches, a man who knew how to snap back your head with a hard jab. I just sat there and listened to him talk, until I finally opened my mouth and said, “I have one question for you.” He retorted “What’s your question?” I asked him, “How many times in a ten round fight do you end up in a clinch with your opponent?” He looked at me and stated, “I don’t know, a lot.” So I asked him, “If you can’t stay out of a clinch when your opponent isn’t really trying to hold you, how are you going to avoid it when he does want to hold you?”

After a little more time talking about the complexity of what it took to fight in this type of event, Art and I moved into an empty ballroom. Art started to show me the speed of his jab. I told him he had a great jab, but that his desire to hit me with it is what sets up my ability to clinch with him, so I can take him to the ground. For him to be effective with his jab, he has to get close enough to hit me. When he is close enough to hit me, it means that he is close enough for me to take him to the ground.

He stated, “Well show me then.” I moved in and grabbed a hold of Art with double underhooks, picked him up and put him on the ground. He tried to push me off, so I moved into an arm bar. Art was not very pleased about what had just occurred. However, he wasn’t mad at me; on the contrary it seemed like I just became his best friend. He started asking me all kinds of questions about Jiu-Jitsu, and what could happen in the fight.

The one thing I remember today as clearly as that day back on November 12, 1993 was Art Jimmerson having a panicked look on his face when he said, “Oh my god, he is going to break my arms and legs, isn’t he?” I told him that all he had to do if he felt pain or discomfort was to tap out. If he tapped out, the fight would be over. If he was put into a submission and he did not tap, then yes, Royce would go until the arm or leg broke or dislocated.

The fight between Royce and Art was not what Rorion or many other people expected. Art came out wearing one boxing glove, and never hit Royce with anything. Royce took Art to the ground with a Moro-te-Gari (double leg) and mounted him. Art held onto Royce, while Royce started hitting Art with little shots to loosen him up and hopefully get him to turn his back for the choke. Art had other ideas. Art felt the pressure from the mount with grapevined legs, and decided he had had enough of this, so he tapped. As soon as he tapped I knew I was the reason he tapped so quickly. I must have had a look on my face like the cat that just swallowed the canary, because Rorion was looking at me like I knew something. Rorion walked over to me and asked, “Why the hell did he tap out to nothing?” I just looked at him and gave a shrug like I had no idea, but I was wishing at that moment that I had kept my big mouth shut.

Unfortunately for Art Jimmerson, the Ultimate Fighting Championship had a devastating impact on his career. Art came into the UFC sporting a competitive record of 29 wins against only 5 losses. After his fight with Royce Gracie, Art continued his boxing career with very little success, compiling a record of 4 wins against 13 losses. Royce went on to legendary status, winning three of the first four UFC tournaments. I went on to become a referee at UFC 2 and have held that position ever since. Did I learn anything from my experience at UFC 1? Absolutely, but that story needs to be told on another day.

]]>http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12696-205/feed/0IFL Standoutshttp://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12732-208/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12732-208/#commentsFri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Bas Ruttenhttp://www.fightmagazine.comRight now in the IFL, there are some guys who are really hot…and I don’t mean good looking! They are, however, very talented fi ghters. First, there’s Ben “Northstar” Rothwell. He’s 8-0, and now holds the record for the fastest KO at thirteen seconds. He’s a big guy that moves really well on his feet. [...]

]]>Right now in the IFL, there are some guys who are really hot…and I don’t mean good looking! They are, however, very talented fi ghters.

First, there’s Ben “Northstar” Rothwell. He’s 8-0, and now holds the record for the fastest KO at thirteen seconds. He’s a big guy that moves really well

on his feet. I had the pleasure of meeting his parents, and there is no doubt where he gets his great personality. They own a restaurant and Ben helps them out from time to time.

Then there is young Chris Horodecki. He’s only 19, and he looks 15! Chris is unbeaten to date, having posted a 10-0 record. Six of those wins are in the IFL. He’s a great fi ghter with amazing striking and take down defense. He goes through people with ease and has excellent conditioning. On top of all of that, he’s a great person and an even better interview!

He’s incredibly popular. Girls and older women like him because he’s cute. The boys his age like him because he’s such a cool guy. The older guys like him because they want their sons to be just like him. I mentioned all this in a press conference, and he told me I had to stop because he was about to cry! He’s always quick with the jokes.

The next standout performance was put in by Vladimir “The Janitor” Matyushenko who is 4-0. He acquired his nickname because he “mops the floor” with his opponents. The guy looks very intimidating, but when you talk with him you realize that he is a real comedian. He has phenomenal wrestling skills, great ground and pound, and good submissions…all while having very heavy hands. He’s smart and articulate and is a great ambassador for the sport, in and out of the ring.

Benji Radach, 4-0, came in this year as the new 185 pounder for the Anacondas. He suffered some injuries that kept him from competing for a while. Despite this, when Mike Pyle left the Anacondas, the fi rst guy I called was Benji. I had trained with him a long time ago and knew how capable he is. During the season, he stopped all but one of his opponents in the first round. Benji is the real deal.

Some folks will tell you that Antonio McKee, 4-0, is not that exciting of a fighter. I say, so what, he gets the job done! He’s a confident fighter who takes his training very seriously, and always shows up in great shape. He’s a super wrestler that got each of his opponents to the ground quickly. He loves the side kick and ground and pound, and if he sees a submission opportunity, he’ll take it. He has an amazing story. He fell on hard times and started hanging with the wrong crowd…was even stabbed. He found MMA and says that it saved him. Now, he teaches kids and shows them there are better ways than being a thug!

Finally, there’s Antoine Jaoude. Antoine, 3-0, said his dream growing up was to be an Olympic champion of any kind, and to work for the United Nations. He was a silver medalist at the Pan Am Games and competed at the 2006 Olympic Games. He speaks five languages! Funny guy and a great fighter.

With so much talent emerging in just its 2nd year, the IFL is shaping up to be one of the most fruitful sources of talent in all of MMA.

]]>http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12732-208/feed/0New Bloodhttp://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12840-217/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12840-217/#commentsFri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Ken Pishnahttp://www.fightmagazine.comIn the exploding world of MMA, it’s sometimes hard for fans to notice some of the amazing fighters on the verge of making it to the next level. We’ve enlisted the experts at MMAWeekly.com to take you deep inside the sport, and present you with some of the newest names to watch. Name: Kevin [...]

]]>In the exploding world of MMA, it’s sometimes hard for fans to notice some of the amazing fighters on the verge of making it to the next level. We’ve enlisted the experts at MMAWeekly.com to take you deep inside the sport, and present you with some of the newest names to watch.

Name: Kevin Swanson

Nickname: “Cub”

Professional Record: 11-1

Height: 5’7”

Weight: 145lbs

Discipline: Shoot Fighting, Muay Thai

Notable Wins: Micah Miller, Tommy Lee, Charlie Valencia

Fighters say that you learn more from a loss than you do from a victory. Well, if that is true, Cub Swanson is one quick study. The World Extreme Cagefighting featherweight contender lost his first professional bout, but has been on an 11-fight winning streak ever since.

Swanson fought his way up through the Total Combat promotion in Tijuana, Mexico and then the venerable King of the Cage organization before he was offered a shot in the WEC.

Like most light weight fighters, Swanson often had to compete in the 155 pound division before the WEC came along. With the promotion’s emphasis on lighter fighters, Swanson jumped at the chance to fight consistently in his true weight class at 145 pounds. He also benefits from the exposure that comes along with the WEC and their national television deal with the Versus network.

Not wasting any time, Swanson, a California native, quickly submitted one of the Midwest’s best fighters in his WEC debut. In little more than three minutes, Tommy Lee (not the drummer from Mötley Crüe) tapped out to Swanson’s guillotine choke.

Returning to the WEC cage on the night of the promotion’s live debut on Versus, Swanson was largely considered an underdog to an undefeated Micah Miller. Swanson and Miller put forth one of the night’s most exciting battles as they exchanged punch combinations and knees to the body while standing, and displayed an array of submission attempts on the ground. Swanson seemed to always be a half step ahead of Miller, and landed the cleaner shots en route to a unanimous decision victory.

Swanson is a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and has been training under legendary martial artist Erik Paulson, as well as at OC Muay Thai. Naturally athletic, he also has a background in soccer.

Under the guidance of Paulson, his professional mixed martial arts record now stands at 11-1. Having shown the management at the WEC that he is a true contender, winning both of his WEC fights decisively, Swanson is now in line for one of the biggest and most exciting challenges of his career.

Famed fighter Jens Pulver is making the move from the UFC to the WEC so that he can fight at his natural weight of 145 pounds, much like Swanson. Pulver’s first opponent in the WEC? You guessed it, none other than Cub Swanson.

In fact, it was Swanson that chose Pulver as an opponent. He was given the choice between Pulver and Canadian Mark Hominick for his next bout. In choosing Pulver, Swanson stated matter-of-factly, “Jens is a little bit of a bigger name. They’re both real tough, but I felt this was the better matchup for me.”

Despite Pulver’s pedigree as the first ever UFC Lightweight Champion, and being a veteran of several top promotions including PRIDE FC, Swanson knows that the challenge Pulver presents comes with a payoff. “A win over Jens is definitely going to help build my career.”

Although it’s a big fight for his career, Swanson still seems to keep things in perspective, not letting the aura of Jens Pulver take over his psyche. “The whole [featherweight] division is exciting. It’s nothing but tough guys, bring ’em on one by one.”

Name: Leonard Garcia

Nickname: “Bad Boy”

Professional Record: 10-2

Height: 5’10”

Weight: 155lbs

Discipline: Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, Wrestling, Boxing

Notable Wins: Alan Berube, Justin James, Jake Hattan

Debuting in 1999, it wouldn’t seem that Leonard Garcia is “new blood” material. But considering that he has been on a three-year hiatus and has only fought three times in the past year and a half, Leonard is still pretty new to most fight fans.

Nathan Marquardt. Duane Ludwig. Pete Spratt. Thomas Schulte. Justin James. These are just some of the fighters that Garcia cut his teeth with when he started out with manager Sven Bean’s Ring of Fire promotion.

Now, with a 10-2 professional record in mixed martial arts, Garcia is on the cusp of becoming a widely known fighter. He made a name for himself at the grass roots level on shows like Ring of Fire and in the United Shoot Wrestling Federation.

His return to fighting in April of 2006 was once again under the Ring of Fire umbrella. True to his Jiu-Jitsu roots – Garcia started training in the discipline when he was 16 years old in an attempt to stay out of trouble – he submitted an overmatched but tough Rocky Johnson in his old stomping grounds in Denver.

Following the win over Johnson, it took a twist of fate for Garcia to take the step up into the Octagon.

Fellow Ring of Fire veteran Alvin Robinson was on tap to face Roger Huerta as the UFC made its Texas debut in Houston. As luck would have it, Robinson injured his knee in his last fight prior to UFC 69 and had to withdraw from the fight.

With only three weeks to go until the Houston date, in stepped Leonard Garcia, long anticipating this day.

He had a tough task in front of him in Huerta. Although he ended up losing a unanimous decision, he and Huerta earned “Fight of the Night” honors and a healthy bonus check when all was said and done. The two threw blows and searched for submissions for the entire three rounds of their bout, but Huerta was a little more effective with his hands and maintained top position throughout most of their time on the ground to get the win.

Garcia’s thoughts on his first time in the Octagon? “The first round, I was extremely nervous. It was the big stage, [but] I was having the time of my life in there. I can’t explain how it felt. It’s been my dream since the UFC started to fight there.”

Not only did Garcia get his shot in the UFC, but in the process, he found a new home. “For [the fight with Huerta] I came up to Greg Jackson’s camp to train and get ready and actually got signed to the team,” explained Garcia. “So now I’m an official part of Jackson’s team.”

It was a great new experience for the Texan. “I’ve trained Jiu-Jitsu for a lot of years, and fought MMA, but I’d never been to a camp where I trained with a lot of MMA fighters.

“I live there at the gym. It’s like being around family all day long,” says Garcia.

It is definitely an empowering experience for Garcia to finally find a place where he has the support of other professional fighters. “When you come out and you’re ready to go and you see all your guys, they’re not telling you anything, but with the way they look at you…it’s all coming down to this one moment…and I think it makes us fight harder.”

Again on short notice, Garcia followed up his battle against Huerta by accepting a fight with The Ultimate Fighter Season 5 participant Allen Berube, on the show’s season finale. This time, Garcia wouldn’t be satisfied with an exciting loss. This time he wanted to walk away with the win.

And he did.

At the 4:22 mark of the first round, Garcia called upon all those years of Jiu-Jitsu training and locked a rear naked choke that left Berube gasping for air and tapping out of the fight.

It was a nice bit of retribution for Garcia. He was among the 19 finalists for Season 5, but was left out of the final 16 due to a hairline fracture in his wrist.

Adding a win to his UFC dream, Garcia could hardly find words to explain his first victory in the Octagon, “It’s an unexplainable feeling. It’s an overwhelming feeling.”

He is on tap to face Cole Miller, another UFC reality show veteran, in late September. But Leonard Garcia hasn’t forgotten his first time under the bright lights of the UFC, and isn’t shy when asked who he really wants to fight.

“I’m going to definitely be looking for Roger [Huerta] again. I want to see what we both do against each other when we both have a solid training camp. Who knows? I might just throw the game plan out the window again and try to go to war. I’m not a guy that likes to work position. I’d much rather try for a submission. If I miss it, get myself in a better position and go again.”

Anderson Silva, the soft spoken son of a police officer and father of four, made his professional fighting debut more than seven years ago, at the fi rst big Vale Tudo event of Brazil, the Meca World Vale Tudo.

Although he made a valiant effort against the skilled Luiz Azeredo, Silva lost the fight by decision. His lack of grappling skills cost him the victory against the BJJ black belt. Silva came back with an amazing streak of nine consecutive wins, mostly by KO on the way to becoming the Meca World Vale Tudo Middleweight Champion.

At Meca VI, Anderson began to show why he is a special fighter. In his fight with Roan Jucao “The Spider” shocked the world as he swept Jucao from the closed guard with a sweep I had never seen before, despite nearly a half-century of experience in BJJ and MMA. Silva secured the closed guard with his legs, forming the fi gure four. Suddenly, he grabbed his foot and brought it inside of Roan’s thigh. Using the foot as a hook, he swept Roan to the mount, and immediately finished the fight with strikes. The technique required flexibility, confidence, and precise timing.

Silva’s international career started with an impressive victory against the fierce Japanese fighter Hayato Sakurai. Sakurai, undefeated until his bout with Silva, lost not only the fight, but afforded Silva his first international “Shooto” title. Silva, like most great fighters, has had bad times as well. One includes losing by submission for the first time to Japanese underdog Daiju Takase at PRIDE 26.

Afterwards, self-proclaimed experts said that Silva was overrated, and that his weaknesses in ground fighting would not allow him to go to the top. Those predictions were a bit off, to say the least. Silva’s record stands presently at 19-4. Anderson is the current UFC Middleweight Champion and he is arguably the top MMA middleweight fighter today.

STRIKING

Anderson is a world class Muay Thai fighter, originally from the hard-core ChuteBoxeAcademy in Curitiba, Brazil. He has trained with the likes of Wanderlei Silva, Murilo “Ninja” Rua, and Mauricio “Shogun” Rua. He has a diversified arsenal of strikes, ranging from strong boxing skills to low and high kicks, flying knees and powerful clinch-work. The Spider could have easily been nicknamed “The Brazilian Missile,” due to the accuracy and destructive power of his strikes.

His accuracy and power has afforded him eleven KOs against top class fighters like Carlos Newton, Rich Franklin, and Nathan Marquardt. One of his most notable KOs was at England’s Cage Rage 16, where he used a beautiful and quite rare Muay Thai reverse elbow known in Thai as “Sok Kratong.” Absolute precision was necessary to successfully execute this technique, which surprised the audience nearly as much as it did his ppponent, Tony Fryklund.

Anderson has defeated several top ground specialists recently. He submitted BJJ black belt Travis Lutter with a triangle choke. Silva said it was so tight that Lutter literally growled before tapping.

Anderson also defended his UFC Middleweight title against BJJ black belt Nate Marquardt, 7 time King of Pancrase. Silva, defeated Nate on his own ground, so to speak. At the beginning of the fight, Nate took Anderson down and went into his guard. Anderson’s extraordinary flexibility prevented a close half guard and he escaped a few moments later. At the end of the round, Silva executed a fierce combination, knocking Nate to the ground, where his powerful punches finished the job.

CONDITIONING

Anderson trains to go nonstop for a full battle, though he seeks the KO or submission from the start. Silva cross trains, practicing with rounds of boxing and Muay Thai adapted to the rules of his upcoming fights. He has amazing flexibility and his legs have the strength of a boa constrictor. At 5’11” and 185 pounds, Silva’s size is not impressive, but his timing, speed, and destructive power are.

HEART

The best example of Anderson’s heart was his battle at Cage Rage 8, where he fought British MMA idol and Middleweight Cage Rage Champion Lee Murray. During the press conference, Murray disrespected the Brazilian flag. When he and Silva came face to face for photos, In the ensuing altercation Murray was literally pushed by Silva’s forehead through the chairs. Anderson calmly said that he learned not to back down from psychological abuse. Anderson later defeated Murray, by unanimous decision.

After the fight, Anderson gave the ripped Brazilian flag to Murray in front of his hometown fans. The audience threw beer cans at the ring. Anderson said that he thought he wouldn’t escape the ring alive, but had to show that disrespect hadn’t gotten the better of him.

THE FUTURE

Anderson has said that would like to retire as the UFC Middleweight Champion. He has hinted also at moving up to the light heavyweight division. While he has shown that he can be beaten in the past. Identifying a fighters weakness and being able to capitalize on it are two different things. Rich Franklin is undoubtedly studying Silva exhaustively before their upcoming match at UFC 77. Franklin surely knows that without being well prepared he will be the next victim caught in the Brazilian Spider’s web.

]]>http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12864-219/feed/0Grand Entranceshttp://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12852-218/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12852-218/#commentsFri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Jason "Mayhem" Millerhttp://www.fightmagazine.comIf you’ve ever seen video clips or pictures of any of my fights, you’ve more than likely said, “What the hell is wrong with that guy? He’s doing a dance before he gets in the ring? Throwing money? Is that guy out of his mind or what, doesn’t he realize he’s about to get in [...]

]]>If you’ve ever seen video clips or pictures of any of my fights, you’ve more than likely said, “What the hell is wrong with that guy? He’s doing a dance before he gets in the ring? Throwing money? Is that guy out of his mind or what, doesn’t he realize he’s about to get in the cage with a guy who wants to tear his head off?!” The answers are simple. Of course I am, and of course I do!

But this wouldn’t appease the editors of FIGHT!, so at gunpoint they have made me elaborate why I have infused pro-wrestling showmanship into the prestigious sport of mixed martial arts. Luckily, the barrel of the gun is quite cool to the touch, and I work the best under pressure.

Pressure is my best friend. I don’t know why, but since I was a kid I tend to do things the hard way. For example, I’m writing this article a few hours from when it goes to press (hence the gunpoint thing) and I think (hope) it will be exemplary, for that very reason. Now I could launch into an armchair psychologist account of why I have developed from birth into a somewhat anti-social, always rebellious youth, and maintained my strange habits beyond my childhood, often making the simplest of situations into a three-ring circus, but I don’t have even an honorary or online certifi cate in psychology, so I’ll leave that to those who decide to psychoanalyze me. The point is, I perform better under stress, so sometimes I’ll create the stress for myself. I do it unfortunately in all areas in my life. Sorry Time Warner Digital cable, I’ll pay when I’m done writing.

The second reason has something to do with graffiti. I know, graffiti, makes absolutely no sense in the world of fighting, but to me it does. I remember being pulled into the high school principal’s office as a teenager for fighting. Before the geek vice principal could launch into his diatribe about how I’ll never amount to anything, he paused and spoke clearly into his walkie-talkie. “Could you please send a janitor to the 300 hallway to clean up some graffiti?” All I could think was damn it, I just put that there 30 minutes ago.

Why the hell does a kid in downtown LA shimmy thirty feet up a street sign protected with barbed wire to draw a picture of a cartoon character smoking a cigarette? Easy, he wants to leave his mark. He wants to be heard, express his feelings, his emotions, be remembered. We all have this desire. Some of us pop out a bunch of kids, some fight, some draw, or work on engines, but we aren’t far from the cave paintings of our distant cousins.

Every entrance has had its own meaning. For a fight that I was making next to nothing for, I threw out a bunch of money, as if to say “money doesn’t matter!” I’ve had choreographed dance routines by the notorious b-boy Flow Master to amp the crowd up, as well as pyrotechnics that I was afraid were going to burn me or the building down. But every time, it was meant to express something going on in my life, or how I was feeling at that point. Sad, happy, whichever, whatever. Self expression, attempting to leave a legacy.

I’m shocked at the lack of showmanship in the world of mixed martial arts. I don’t know about the readers, but I grew up being babysat by Optimus Prime, and then eating dinner with “Hacksaw” Jim Dugan, The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase, and “Hulk” Hogan, with whom I shook hands at an event for 4th graders; I thought his hands felt like a bunch of bananas. These characters and larger than life personalities really left an impression on me to this day. The clearly defined roles of good guy/bad guy were so apparent to a preteen Jason Miller, but times have changed, and so has the game.

Gone are the days of pre-determined outcomes, as well as the faces and heels of the pro wrestling world, unless of course you still watch that kind of “fighting.” With Zuffa blazing trails in American entertainment and bringing MMA to the forefront of pop culture, I think it is the athletes’ responsibility to showcase their personalities to the world. You’d much rather see me win or get my ass kicked if you remember or care about me. Not to say everyone needs to be as wild and outlandish as I tend to be, but if we don’t know who you are, we don’t care one way or the other. My “wrasslin” entrances are just my special way to get across who I am.

I see quite a few fi ghters get nerves before the fi ght. Sometimes the dressing room of an event can look like the inside of one of those amphibious vehicles that stormed Normandy on D-day. I always laugh when I see some young bucks looking like caged lions, pacing back and forth, amped like they swallowed five gallons of Starbucks.

Although I can’t say I don’t get some kinds of nerves, I deal with it in a much different way than most people. When I think the plane might be going down and every other passenger on the plane is white-knuckle gripping the armrests, I am usually giggling to myself. It may well be genetic, because my dad has a similar response to intense situations, which probably didn’t help him on any Kuwaiti battlefield, but apparently does help a Miller handle the worst of situations.

I guess my laughing and displays of sometimes silly proportions go right along with my trademark “Strip of Doom” haircut – just another way I deal with the world, however boring and understimulating it might be at times. Piling stress on top of an already stressful situation may seem like an insane thing to do, but in my humble opinion, a lot of the best things in life tend to be a little crazy. I encourage anyone who can read these words, as well as those who can’t, to express themselves to the best of their abilities and leave a mark in whatever way you can.

Lastly, I hope anyone watching my fights will be entertained from the time I walk into the building to the minute I walk out. If the crowd wanted to just see any fight, they could hang out at the local bar for a few nights with a water pistol. Entertainment is why they paid 300 bucks to sit in the nosebleed section. If entertainment is what you want, then that’s what you get. Now that I’ve explained that, good luck figuring out the rest of me. And editors, please, get the gun off my temple. Thanks.

]]>http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12852-218/feed/0Where Are They Now?http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12744-209/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12744-209/#commentsFri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Bear Frazerhttp://www.fightmagazine.comMost UFC Heavyweight Champions are pretty large individuals, and because of that, they probably aren’t the best at playing hide and seek. But former champ Ricco Rodriguez is diffi cult to fi nd. Over the past year, he made a couple of appearances at smaller MMA shows, where he steamrolled through his unfortunate foes. [...]

]]>Most UFC Heavyweight Champions are pretty large individuals, and because of that, they probably aren’t the best at playing hide and seek. But former champ Ricco Rodriguez is diffi cult to fi nd. Over the past year, he made a couple of appearances at smaller MMA shows, where he steamrolled through his unfortunate foes.

And then…..he vanished.

Only days after FIIGHT! sent this journalist on a manhunt for Rodriguez, it was learned that he left the country for Zagreb, Croatia, to help Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic prepare for his battle against Cheick Kongo at UFC 75: Champion vs. Champion.

But this isn’t completely out of character for Rodriguez. After all, he’s known for helping others get ready for their upcoming fi ghts, and Cro Cop is just the latest heavyweight to utilize his talent. “Ricco is very, very generous to a fault when it comes to his training techniques and training methods,” Saul Soliz says, who has trained him since 1999. “I think a lot of people have adopted that into their program and have been very successful for what Ricco’s been gracious enough to give him.”

Since he fell out of the spotlight, most MMA aficionados think Rodriguez has ballooned out of shape and is spending a considerable amount of time bonding with Twinkie the Kid. Apparently, that isn’t entirely true. Although he took some time away from the sport, it looks like he is on the verge of making a comeback.

In order to move forward though, sometimes a few steps back are necessary.

**

It’s the morning of September 28th, 2002. The night before, Ricco Rodriguez defeated Randy Couture for the UFC Heavyweight Championship. It was the proudest moment of his career.

Five months later, his time was up. In his first title defense, Rodriguez lost the strap to Tim Sylvia at UFC 41: Onslaught due to strikes in the first round. “I think the success was overwhelming,” Soliz says. “At the time, he probably should’ve taken a little bit of time off just to enjoy the victory and savor the moment of being a champ, but Ricco isn’t that way. He’s pretty competitive. So when they offered him a fight, he took it.”

It didn’t get any better. In a cross-promotional heavyweight showdown, Rodriguez lost a controversial decision to Antonio Rodrigo Nogueria at PRIDE Total Elimination 2003, and at UFC 45: Revolution, he dropped a unanimous decision to Pedro Rizzo, who utilized his takedown defense and back-peddling plan to a tee.

That was the last commitment on his UFC contract, and he opted not to re-sign with them, or any other organization. He needed a break from the sport. “I think Ricco had other things he needed to pursue, and he didn’t have a chance because he had dedicated the past six years of his life to MMA,” Soliz explains. “He had some other things he wanted to do that were distracting for him.”

Over the next year, Rodriguez’s fighting took a backseat as he worked through his issues. Since he didn’t work out much during that time period, he gained a massive amount of weight, puffing up past 300 pounds. That isn’t easy to do. “Ricco doesn’t do anything half ass. He trains hard, he has fun hard; everything he does, he does 200 percent,” Ken Pavia, a well-established agent who represented Rodriguez from 2005 until 2006, explains. “And when he started going off track in terms of the diet, he did that hard too.”

Eventually, Ricco started trimming those extra pounds, and went back to the basics by dominating fighters at smaller MMA contests (minus the Ron Waterman and Robert Beraun battles). In 2006, he signed with the World Fighting Alliance (WFA). At their show King of the Streets, he defeated Waterman in a rematch.

But the WFA was short-lived. When Zuffa (parent company of UFC and WEC) purchased the organization in December 2006, they also received the rights to his contract. Rodriguez, however, had other plans. “He had told me back when the WFA was acquired by the UFC, he asked for his release,” Pavia explains. “He didn’t want to fight with them at the time.”

Maybe he needed another break.

**

Rodriguez had to get out of Patterson, New Jersey. It wasn’t a good environment for him, considering that most of his friends had gotten into trouble and wound up in jail.

That wasn’t a path he would go down. When he was 17 years old, the high school wrestler relocated to Los Angeles, California, and he eventually linked up with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu experts Rigan and Jean Jacques Machado. Under their tutelage, he won several tournaments, and in 1999 took home the gold medal at the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) Submission Wrestling World Championship.

Coincidentally, he started competing in MMA that same year. During the fall, he walked through the doors of the Patumwadee Thai Boxing Gym, and was introduced to his now longtime trainer, Saul Soliz. “They had a regional MMA show and Ricco was going to fi ght Sam Adkins,” Soliz recalls. “The promoter for the event brought Ricco into my place because he needed a place to train. We started training, we hit it off, and he started training with me full time after that.”

It paid off. Rodriguez choked Adkins out, and then he went on a tear. After disposing of Travis Fulton at King of the Cage, he traveled to Japan’s PRIDE organization and earned wins over Gary Goodridge, Giant Ochiai, and John Marsh. Then, he returned to King of the Cage and put a nasty knee bar on Paul Buentello.

That was enough to capture the attention of the UFC. His winning streak continued as he decisively beat four top mixed martial artists (Andre Arlovski, Pete Williams, Jeff Monson and Tsuyoshi Kohsaka), thus earning a title shot at then champion Randy Couture at UFC 39: The Warriors Return.

Although Couture was able to put up a strong showing in earlier rounds, Rodriguez turned it up as the fight went on and was able to take him down with relative ease before finishing him off in the fifth round. He took home the UFC Heavyweight Championship and immortalized himself as one of the elite.

During this time of his career, Rodriguez would box and do pad work each morning. In the afternoon, he would lift weights and do sprints. And in the evening, he grappled. It was his discipline and strict training regiment that shaped him into one of the biggest threats in mixed martial arts. “He did everything that everybody else wasn’t willing to do, and I think that’s why he’s been more successful than anyone at the time,” Soliz states. “He set the standard.”

**

In Croatia, Rodriguez is helping Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic train for his next fight. Cro Cop, having spent most of his time attempting to decapitate his opponents with his nasty left leg kick, stands to gain extensive knowledge in grappling and octagon control from the former champ.

“I think he takes into consideration that Ricco was probably the best heavyweight in the cage at one time. I think Cro Cop wanted to pick his brain and get some insight,” Soliz says. “Ricco is an awesome wrestler with good Jiu-Jitsu, and he never had any problem taking anybody down. Cro Cop might want to add that to his repertoire.”

Between training with the dangerous heavyweight striker and a win against Lloyd Marshbanks at a low-key event in July, it looks like Rodriguez could return to the octagon in the near future. However, that is purely speculation, and it may be too early to ponder his comeback. Only Rodriguez knows the answer to that. Still, it leaves room to contemplate.

“I think he’d like to go to the UFC if they’ll have him back. There are plenty of guys who offer good rematches, as well as good PPV action. I think it’s definitely something he wants to do,” Soliz explains. “He’s just trying to get in shape and do his thing. I think when he comes back, everyone will be surprised at how much he has evolved, and how much of a game he introduces and still has. I think he is going to do well.”

]]>http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12744-209/feed/0Brotherhood of the Cagehttp://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12720-207/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12720-207/#commentsThu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Donovan Craighttp://www.fightmagazine.com“It’s called the Mongolian Attack…” I am watching Greg Jackson as he instructs Keith Jardine and Tait Fletcher on one of Jackson’s famously arcane mixed martial arts techniques before they begin a sparring session at Jackson’s New Mexico gym. “What the Mongolians would do is rush in with their cavalry,” says Jackson from outside the [...]

I am watching Greg Jackson as he instructs Keith Jardine and Tait Fletcher on one of Jackson’s famously arcane mixed martial arts techniques before they begin a sparring session at Jackson’s New Mexico gym.

“What the Mongolians would do is rush in with their cavalry,” says Jackson from outside the ring, his eyes wide with the excitement of a kid revealing the plot to the next Harry Potter. “Then, when the knights would charge out to confront them, the Mongolians would turn around and appear to retreat. Then suddenly they would turn in their saddles, fire their bows over their shoulders, and decimate the knights with their arrows…” Jardine and Fletcher hang on Jackson’s every word.

“The point is, even though it looked like they were retreating,” Jackson pauses to be sure they get the point, “they were actually drawing you in.”

Keith Jardine, whose ring name is the “The Dean of Mean,” glowers across the ring, exuding menace. Tait stares right back at him and erupts with “I’M ABOUT TO GO MONGOLIAN ON YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” The two huge men, when they are not fi ghting each other, will tell you that they are like brothers.

Jackson’s martial arts school is tucked away on a side street, right before you get to the part of Albuquerque that you don’t want to be in after dark. On a sign above the entrance, a snake and tiger glare at each other across an oriental symbol. The gym is bare, ascetic, and out of the way. But like pilgrims flocking to some remote and inhospitable region of the Himalayas to sit at the feet of an eastern master, fighters from all over the world come to 5505 Acoma Street to learn from Greg Jackson. Although Jackson has shot to fame as a coach of professional fighters, and the gym boasts a large number of stars, he does not ask for payment from them for his ser vices. He earns his living from the dues his many private students pay to take his classes. Jackson is first and foremost a teacher.

Behind me, I hear Georges St Pierre enter the gym. Wearing sunglasses and talking on a cell phone, he could be a high powered Hollywood movie producer. He heads straight to the back to get dressed out. He is in town to train for his upcoming fight against Josh Koscheck.

My attention returns to the two men in the ring. Jardine is looking for the takedown, but he seems slow and plodding. His punches and kicks thud ponderously against Tait’s arms and legs as Tait blocks everything with apparent ease. Fletcher is the larger man and is countering well, frustrating Jardine with angles and generally getting the best of it. Then in a flash Jardine wakes up; he fires a quick three punch combination, pop, pop, bam, and instantly follows by shooting in and putting Tait on his back. It is like watching lightning strike. “Uh-oh …”I hear someone say, “he must have got Jardine mad.”

In addition to the many major stars that call the gym home, there is also a healthy class of fi ghters pushing up from beneath, just about break out. There is the dynamic grappler Damicio Page, local favorite Donald Cerrone and the lionhearted Leonard Garcia, who after losing the year’s most exciting fight to Roger Huerta in UFC 69, rebounded with an impressive win over Alan “Lobster” Berubie in the finale of The Ultimate Fighter. Garcia is so devoted to working with Jackson that he actually lives above the gym. With his entertaining style and his likeability, he is a big win or two away from being a star in the sport.

The gym is also home to several talented female fighters: Julie Kedzie, who is as perky and sweet outside the ring as she is ferocious inside it, a blonde Amazonian stunner named Holly Holm who may be the most devastating female striker on the planet, and a tiny woman who looks like the kind of innocent, mousy housewife you might find in any suburb across America. That is, until she starts throwing punches and becomes a little brunette buzz-saw. If Ricky Hatton and Sandra Bullock had a daughter, she would be Jody Escobel. When I ask what her ring name is, she says she doesn’t have one. After watching her practically run a sparring partner out of the ring I suggest one: “Give ‘em Hell.” Jody Give ‘em Hell Escobel.

Although this lower tier of fighters is still winning, the stars of the team have recently been beset by a string of high profile setbacks. At UFC 69, Diego Sanchez, who is no longer on the team, was upset in a snoozer of a fi ght by Josh Koscheck. Later that same night in the main event, St. Pierre was shocked by unheralded Matt Serra and knocked out. At UFC 71, Jardine got caught by a crude but heavy-handed Houston Alexander, and went to sleep just 48 seconds into the first round. Then recently, at UFC 73, Nate Marquardt was stopped in his title fight with UFC Middleweight champion Anderson Silva. While this fight was not an upset, Marquardt fought poorly and was easily dominated by the Brazilian champion. When I see him, Nate is still sporting a mouse under his left eye.

They’re all coming off losses, but you would never know it by the atmosphere in the gym. Rather than getting the impression that you are on a sinking ship, it feels like the losses have strengthened the team’s resolve to succeed.

There isn’t any professional rivalry or petty jealousy in this room. They are all training, struggling, and suffering together.

***

The gym is small enough that you can hear pretty much everything going on in it. Rashad Evans and St. Pierre, who has come out of the dressing room, are talking by the free weights.

“Man when you got daht finuhl takedown, he was feenished!” St. Pierre says in his Québecois accent. They both laugh in the knowing way fighters have when talking to each other about fights. Rashad shakes his head. “I know, he was done. DONE!” He clinches his fists and grits his teeth in mock frustration. “It’s okay, I’ll get his ass.” Rashad says suddenly turning serious.

I assume that they are talking about Evan’s last opponent, Tito Ortiz. At UFC 73 Evans fought the “Huntington Beach Badboy” to a draw. Rashad started out slow in the fight, as if he was surprised by Tito’s strength. But then he began to come on, and did in fact look to be getting the better of Tito when the final round ended. The rematch is set for October 20 at UFC 77.

***

Later in the day, St. Pierre is getting ready to spar in the gym’s Octagon and I ask Jackson if I can watch. “It’s your house, boss.” he says. One of the endearing peculiarities of Mr. Jackson is that he calls everybody “boss.”

Georges will work first against Marquardt. Jackson wants St. Pierre to practice staying on his feet and not getting taken down. Jackson knows that Koscheck, a decorated wrestler, will look to negate St. Pierre’s devastating standing strikes by bringing the fight to the ground.

As they begin, Marquardt works his way in behind jabs, throwing the punches in duplicate and triplicate while looking for the opportunity to shoot in and tackle Georges to the floor. The round is pretty uneventful, but Nate never gets St. Pierre off his feet. They spar for 5 minutes, with a 45 second rest. This is 15 seconds less rest between rounds than they will get in a real match; suffer in the gym so you don’t have to in the ring.

Next in with GSP (I always think St. Pierre’s nickname sounds like a nutritional supplement) is Rashad Evans. Rashad is more aggressive than Marquardt and looks to close the distance faster. Rashad has quick hands and his punches have snap, but they seem wide. He holds his left hand out in an exaggerated position, shaking it like he is dangling a bell in front of St. Pierre. This seems to me like it would be easy to counter, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe he is trying to draw St. Pierre in. If he is, it doesn’t work. St. Pierre is a study in composure, form, and economy of motion. A beautiful thing to watch.

Next is Keith Jardine. All of Georges’ sparring partners have been bigger than he is, but Jardine absolutely dwarfs GSP. St. Pierre seems to be tiring a bit now, and Jardine is able to utilize his size and strength to push him around, chasing him. Towards the end of the round, he gets St. Pierre down on the ground but then is reversed and ends up with the smaller man on top of him, in his guard. Keith didn’t see that one coming.

Finally Georges gets to face somebody about his own size, the valiant Leonard Garcia. Perhaps sensing that with St. Pierre tired the best defense might be a good offense, Garcia attacks St. Pierre like a pit terrier. Garcia, who is an excellent Jiu Jitsu player, is able to get Georges off his feet but then St. Pierre is able to catch Garcia being over-aggressive, and taps him out with an arm lock from the guard. Garcia, angry with himself for getting caught, cusses up a storm. Jackson stands them up and they begin again.

The whole gym has now stopped its activity and is watching the sparring. Jardine, Rashad, and Marquardt are on the outside shouting encouragement to both of their teammates as they come down the home stretch of today’s marathon session.

Everyone is amazed at how well St. Pierre has done today. The physical powers of the man; his speed, strength, balance, and endurance, bust be seen to be believed. It doesn’t really come across on TV like it does when you see it up close and in person.

“Yeah, he’s going to walk through him.” I agree, perhaps a little overcome with the spectacle I have just witnessed.

“DON’T TELL ANYBODY!” Big Mike Van Arsdale shouts so that everybody in the gym can hear him. “That’s how shit gets in the wind.”

GSP, Greg Jackson, and the rest of the crew are planning a little surprise for Josh Koscheck.

*********

At the end of the day, I sit down with Greg Jackson in his office at the front of the gym. On the wall I notice portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Legend has it that both of the former Presidents were fine wrestlers. The tall and wiry Lincoln was said to have been strong as an ox and something of a local champion in his youth in Illinois. Washington, who was a powerful and robust man himself, once bested seven of his soldiers in a row in wrestling when he was 47 years old. These anecdotes are certainly stored away somewhere in Jackson’s encyclopedic memory.

“What I do…” Jackson stops as if forming in his mind exactly what he wants to say. “I look for underlying themes in nature. Just like physics governs everything from a show falling to the spinning of the planets, this process large works for this process small.” He is peering into my face to see if I understand. I think I do, but I want him to elaborate so I don’t say anything. “I look for that in combat,” he continues, “I look for axioms that govern, say a battle in World War II, that I can use the same principle in a one on one fight in the modern age.”

“A skeptic would say that they don’t have anything to do with each other.” I point out.

“Well, my favorite example,” he explains, “is what General Sherman said about keeping your enemy on the ‘horns of a dilemma.’” Here, Jackson brightens; his gestures become sharp and his mannerisms more animated. I am reminded of how energetic he was when he explained the Mongolian Attack earlier.

“When General Sherman was marching through the South in the Civil War, he would put his army particularly equal distances from two towns the South wanted to defend. Now whichever one the Confederacy defended, he would just march in and take the other one without much of a fight, which would then put him in position for two more towns. So this is an incredible axiom in combat because, for example, in your side mount you always want to set yourself up for two attacks, let’s say an arm bar and a choke. Whichever one your opponent defends, you should always be in position to rotate into the opposite one”I ask him how such an obviously smart guy, the sort of fellow you might expect to be dressed in a tweed blazer pontificating about Kant’s Categorical Imperative to graduate students at Berkeley, ended up in such a rough business as mixed martial arts.

“I was blessed to be raised with a great family in a bad neighborhood. My parents were these incredibly intellectual pacifist hippies, and I was constantly being encouraged to experiment with thought and what not, but I was also basically the only white kid in an all Hispanic neighborhood growing up. They had this very machismo culture. They didn’t really care about anything except whether or not you could fight. So you’re this great little bookworm or whatever and it’s like ’I don’t care, I’m going to kick your ass.’ So I figure I’d better learn about this butt kicking stuff. That’s what got me into the martial arts.” Jackson’s crooked nose testifi es to some of his early scraps on the streets of Albuquerque.

“I had to find a balance, because I would fight in the streets and my parents would yell at me that fighting was not the answer, yada yada yada, and my life would be terrible, but if I didn’t fight my life would be a lot worse. So I discovered a middle road. That there is an appropriate time to use violence and an appropriate time to refrain.”

”I became almost entirely self-taught. I approached the martial arts with the same kind of reckless abandon that I approached any subject, whether it is philosophy or history or quantum mechanics. I have always loved to learn, I still learn. ‘How can I get the best leverage out of this position, how do I get out of this, where do I go’, you know what I mean?”

“You’re only 33 now, and very close to the top of the MMA world. Where are you at 53 or 63?” I ask. The question is a bit of a cliché, but appropriate in this instance I think.

“I think I have about 10 or 15 years of training fighters and traveling around with them left in me. I always want to teach. My favorite thing in the world is to teach, to give people what I get. When you teach a kid about an arm bar, or that they can get tackled by somebody bigger and stronger and still win, teach them that they can break a guy’s arm from that position, and they’re like ‘HOLY SHIT, HOLY SHIT. I see now’. Man, that’s addictive.”

We are interrupted by Georges St. Pierre, now showered and in street clothes. He has apparently overheard some of the conversation on his way out, passing by the open door of the office. “This man is a genius!” he exclaims for my benefit, pointing his finger at Jackson. “I’m serious, a genius!”

***

I fly out of the Albuquerque airport the next morning. My mind is mulling over this peculiar little shaman and his band of acolytes. They remind me of a platoon of soldiers, brothers in arms, who are pinned down at the moment under a withering fire, but who are kept together by esprit de corps and the almost mystical regard that they all have for their leader. Jackson’s guys might be a little shot up right now, but you can be sure he is preparing the counterattack.

My attention turns out the window, to the bareness of the New Mexico landscape. Viewed from on high, the terrain is brown and ugly. There really shouldn’t be anything out here, I think to myself. Then I see a perfectly symmetrical patch of lush vegetation, surrounded by miles of sand and rock. How did that happen, I wonder; a jewel of green amidst the violence of the high desert.

]]>http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12720-207/feed/0MMA’s Ten Most Heated Feudshttp://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12828-216/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12828-216/#commentsThu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Sam Caplanhttp://www.fightmagazine.comIn The Godfather , Don Vito Corleone asks Johnny Fontaine if he spends time with his family, proclaiming that a “man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” Well, a sport can never be a real sport without a signature feud or rivalry. All the major sports have them. [...]

]]>In The Godfather , Don Vito Corleone asks Johnny Fontaine if he spends time with his family, proclaiming that a “man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

Well, a sport can never be a real sport without a signature feud or rivalry. All the major sports have them.

Major League Baseball has the Red Sox vs. the Yankees; college football has the University of Miami vs. Notre Dame; the NBA has the Spurs vs. the Mavericks; and the NFL has the Jets vs. Patriots.

So where does MMA rate in its lineage of feuds? While it’s yet to experience a feud big enough to rival the ones of some the more “mainstream” sports, it has had its fair share of historic battles that satisfied existing fans and made new ones.

Let’s take a look at the ten most heated feuds in MMA to date:

10. Dana White vs. Jerry Millen

After seeing how much publicity that White was getting for the UFC by taking on more than just a behind-the-scenes role, Dream Stage Entertainment began to encourage Millen to become more of a public figurehead for the company’s U.S. fight operations.

Millen, whose primary role was to direct PRIDE’s television operations in the US, did what his bosses asked of him and started to become more visible in the public eye. He was very outspoken about PRIDE’s status as a fi ght organization around the globe and was very vocal about the failure to make a match between Chuck Liddell and Wanderlei Silva.

UFC president Dana White blamed PRIDE for not making the Liddell/Silva match happen, and Millen took issue. After trading barbs through print, Millen and White faced off head-to-head via phone on The Scott Ferrall Show on Sirius Satellite Radio last fall.

White and Millen exchanged pot shots and hurled insults back and forth in a verbal altercation which has now become legendary. The interview was uploaded to the Internet soon after, where hundreds of thousands of fight fans were able to listen to Millen and White go at it with the same intensity you would expect from Liddell and Silva.

While the feud between PRIDE and the UFC is over, Millen insists that the feud between him and White is still going strong.

“[It] only made it to number ten?” Millen pondered when contacted by FIGHT Magazine. “Well, if the UFC wouldn’t have bought the number one MMA promotion in the world [PRIDE], the feud would have been at number one. The PRIDE battle may be over, but believe me the MMA war with Dana has only begun.”

9. Frank Shamrock vs. Ken Shamrock

Ken is perhaps the biggest reason why adoptive kid brother Frank transitioned from submission wrestling into mixed martial arts. The younger Shamrock trained at Ken’s Lion’s Den and once considered him to be his mentor.

Everything changed in the mid-90’s after philosophical differences arose between the two. Frank felt that Ken’s training techniques and business practices were becoming obsolete, and made his feelings known.

“I voiced my concern about that, and basically I was told to do what I was told,” Frank said during an interview for Sportsline earlier this year. “I was very vocal, and I’ve always been very vocal about what I believed in. I kept on it and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to change, there’s a better way to do business.’ And eventually we came down to Ken telling me, ‘You don’t have what it takes, you’re not going to be a world champion, and I want you to run my gyms for the rest of your life.’”

A cold war has existed ever since. For example when asked about Ken’s 2005 TKO loss to Kazushi Sakuraba, which was considered controversial because of a possible early stoppage, Frank didn’t hesitate to throw Ken under the bus.

“If you’re sleeping with your head through the second rope, you’re in a bad way,” Frank said during an interview with Sherdog.com. “He got clocked. He went down. According to the rules he was no longer defending himself and that’s the end of the fight.”

Thanks for the support, bro.

8. Don Frye vs. Ken Shamrock

While wrestling for the WWE, 35-year old Ken Shamrock was assigned to work with 19-year old Alicia Webb. Webb was hired to play the on-camera role of Shamrock’s sister, and became a regular television character known as Ryan Shamrock.

According to pro wrestling lore, business eventually mixed with pleasure and the two started dating, despite a sixteen year age difference.

The relationship between Shamrock and Webb was shielded from mainstream attention until Don Frye spilled the beans when he made comments suggesting that Shamrock cheated on and divorced his wife for a younger woman. Shamrock didn’t take too kindly to Frye’s words and a feud was born that culminated with a match at PRIDE 19 in 2002.

Frye won the match via split decision, and it was thought that the grudge between the two was put to bed. However, earlier this year the two were at it again when Shamrock submitted a video question for Frye’s “Dear Don” segment on IFL Battleground with the intent of promoting a match between their respective teams.

Shamrock poked fun at Frye’s Tom Selleck-esque mustache and Frye responded with a tongue-in-cheek response that insinuated Shamrock was gay. We think he was joking, but when it comes to Frye, you never know.

Might we see Frye vs. Shamrock II? Neither fighter is retired, so you never know.

7. Jens Pulver vs. B.J. Penn

They made nice following their rematch at the season finale of The Ultimate Fighter 5 in Las Vegas this past June, but it didn’t change the fact that the two have hated each other for years.

So, what was it that caused these two men to despise each other? The two offer different perspectives on their beef neither of which is completely satisfactory.

“After a fight he would try to be real cordial and respectful to my face, and then every time I would read an interview all he was ever doing was talking shit,” Penn began. “After a while it builds up and just gets to you and then you just want to take care of it.”

Pulver had a slightly different take than Penn, but still offered an answer that didn’t fully explain the venom that had existed.

“We’ve been in each other’s heads and in each other’s interviews since he came into MMA,” stated Pulver during an interview conducted in the days leading up to the rematch. “I’ve had to listen to B.J. Penn this and B.J. Penn that. He’s like my archrival. It’s always been the two of us and that’s only because of the success that we’ve had.”

The feud appears to be over following Penn’s dominating win at the TUF 5 finale, with both going their separate ways. Pulver will return to the 145 lbs. division when he debuts for the WEC on September 5, while Penn is eyeing an eventual return to 170 lbs.

6. Frank Shamrock vs. Phil Baroni

What do you get when you take two larger than life personalities who know how to market a fight better than Don King?

You get a non-UFC main event that primarily relying on Internet marketing actually got people excited – no easy feat!

Baroni called Shamrock out in several interviews during his fi rst run in the UFC. Some of the “New York Bad Ass’” comments might have been misinterpreted, as Baroni looked up to Shamrock as a fi ghter and simply wanted a shot to prove himself against a man he considered to be one of the best in his weight class.

The war of words escalated and became extremely personal when Shamrock issued a series of YouTube videos that took the feud to a new level. From mocking Baroni’s amateur bodybuilding background, to accusing him of using steroids, Shamrock did whatever he could to build interest in a potential match.

Baroni soon struck back in the press and accused Shamrock of having no heart, coming back simply for the money, being a pussy. He even hurled some homophobic slurs at Frank.

If the feud was ugly the subsequent payoff was beautiful! Shamrock and Baroni’s match in June did what few thought it could do: live up to the pre-fight hype.

Both men entered the fight injured and left the cage looking like victims of a car crash. Shamrock walked out the victor after applying a rear naked choke on Baroni toward the latter stages of the second round.

5. Tito Ortiz vs. Dana White

Do you remember cringing at the utter lack of realism of the WWE during the years it featured an over the top and completely unrealistic feud between “The Chairman of the Board” Vince Mc- Mahon and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin? Who knew we’d get to see a real-life version a few years later between White and Ortiz?

White actually was Ortiz’s manager during the early portion of Tito’s career, before Dana and the Fertittas bought the UFC from SEG. Apparently their friendship couldn’t withstand the change of White going from having worked for Ortiz to Ortiz working for White.

After multiple dustups during contract negotiations, Ortiz negotiated a boxing match against White that was to have taken place this past April. Ortiz never showed. The reason why the glorified sparring session never took place has been open to interpretation from both parties.

The nature of the feud has always been very personal, but White may have outdone himself during an interview with SteveCofield on Sporting News Radio during the morning of UFC 73:

Dana White: The guy (Ortiz), I’m telling you, he’s not the brightest bulb on the porch. He’s a complete moron and what’s scarier is that he doesn’t think he is. He thinks he’s intelligent; he thinks he’s smart and articulate. So that’s a scary combination.

SteveCofield: Maybe it goes back to Rashad Evans and our comments about Jenna Jameson? Maybe Jenna is too good to him? Maybe he needs a battleaxe …

White: That’s two idiots together. That’s even worse, that’s double idiot power right there. That’s his manager, whom I’ve had to talk to on the phone several times and I’d rather talk to this table right here then have a conversation with that moron again.

To date, we have yet to have any “yo momma” cracks but we’re not ruling anything out.

4. Wanderlei Silva vs. Chuck Liddell

There appears to be nothing personal between Silva and Liddell, but a strong professional rivalry has existed between them for years which has, in fact outlived the feud between Pride and the UFC. .

UFC president Dana White tried to facilitate a match between the two by having Liddell enter the Pride Middleweight Grand Prix in 2003

Unfortunately, Liddell spoiled the anticipated payoff of a matchup between the two in the finals after he was TKO’d at 3:10 in the second round against Quinton “Rampage” Jackson.

Another attempt to have Silva and Liddell face each other was made last year. White announced at UFC 61 that Liddell would fight Silva in November if Liddell was able to beat Renato “Babalu” Sobral at UFC 62.

Following Liddell’s quick win over Sobral at UFC 62, a made-for-TV stare down between the two took place in the middle of the Octagon, with neither man backing down. However disaster struck once again when Silva was knocked out by a head kick from Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic during PRIDE’s Final Confl ict Absolute last September.

Talks of a match were rekindled following Liddell’s loss to Jackson at UFC 71. However, in a July article by Kevin Iole of Yahoo!, White revealed that the fight was off yet again and claimed that Silva turned down the chance to fight Liddell at UFC 76 on Sept. 22 in Anaheim. Silva responded and claimed he wanted to fight Liddell in November, as his move to the US would interfere with training.

Have no fear, because as we went to press there were rumors that Silva and Liddell could finally meet during the UFC’s event scheduled for Dec. 29. Both warriors want the match to happen and it seems inevitable that this feud will move from the negotiation table and into the cage.

Boxing had Ali vs. Frazier, and MMA needs Liddell vs. Silva.

3. Kazushi Sakuraba vs. The Gracie Family

This was a feud so big that it involved an entire family, and it earned Sakuraba the nickname “The Gracie Hunter.”

At PRIDE 8 in 1999, Sakuraba became the first Japanese fighter to defeat a Gracie since 1955, when Masahiko Kimura was victorious over Helio Gracie in a submission Judo match in Brazil.

Kimura won that match by placing Helio in a reverse ude-garami. When the stubborn patriarch of the Gracie clan refused to submit, Helio’s older brother, Carlos, eventually threw in the towel. The match became so legendary that the move used to win the match was eventually re-named in Kimura’s honor.

In a twist so ironic it caused many to question the outcome of the match, Sakuraba defeated Royler Gracie with a Kimura at PRIDE 8 after the referee stopped the match with just seconds left in the final round.

Unhappy with the decision, the Gracies wanted a shot at redemption and nominated

Royler’s older brother, Royce, to take on Sakuraba in a match intended to restore the Gracie family name. The two would meet during the second round of the PRIDE Grand Prix in 2000.

Sakuraba was victorious yet again in a match with a controversial outcome. At Gracie’s request, there was no time limit to prevent judges from deciding the outcome. After 90 minutes of action, between rounds another Gracie would throw in a towel. This time it was Royce’s brother, Rorion.

Sakuraba would go on to defeat Royce’s cousin, Renzo, at PRIDE 10 in 2000 and Renzo’s brother, Ryan Gracie, at PRIDE 12, also in 2000.

Royce finally got one back for the family by winning a decision over Sakuraba at K-1’s Dynamite USA!! event in June, but the win was tainted after the California State Athletic Commission claimed that Gracie had tested positive for steroids.

Knowing the warrior spirit of both Sakuraba and the Gracies, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see this feud produce one more match.

Rickson vs. Sakuraba, anyone?

2. Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock

No UFC main event in the pre-TUF era garnered more mainstream attention than the first Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock battle.

The bad blood between Shamrock and Ortiz didn’t spill publicly until after Ortiz did his grave digging routine following his TKO victory over Lion’s Den fighter Guy Mezger. Shamrock took issue with Ortiz’s antics and Tito responded by flipping him the bird with both hands.

The first match between the two took place at UFC 40, and ended after Shamrock’s corner threw in the towel in the third round. Ortiz had taken over the fight and pummeled Shamrock, turning his face into hamburger meat.

The sequels in this trilogy were about as necessary and compelling as the follow- ups to The Matrix. However the box office gods couldn’t be ignored and the pair had two more fights in which Ortiz manhandled the faded Shamrock both times stopping him well inside the first round.

1. PRIDE vs. UFC

There is no MMA-related feud more responsible for heated arguments than the rivalry that existed between PRIDE and the UFC. For years, MMA fans argued as to which promoter was the premier fight organization.

Verbal salvos were fired from each side of the globe for years, prompting calls for head-to-head matches to decide once and for all which promotion was tops.

There was some PRIDE vs. UFC crossover, such as Liddell competing in the Middleweight GP, and former UFC heavyweight champion Ricco Rodriguez competing in the PRIDE Heavyweight GP in 2003. However, without a definitive head-to-head challenge, a conclusive answer to which promotion was stronger was never provided. As such, the debate lives on.

This feud came to a literal end on March 27 when press conferences were held in Japan and in the United States to officially announce that Dream Stage Entertainment had sold PRIDE to Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta. While the purchase wasn’t completed until May, 3/27/07 is a date that will live in MMA infamy for many diehard fans.

Some feuds we’d like to see, just so we could watch the fights: •

Wanderlei Silva vs. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua

For years the two had been teammates with Chute Boxe in Curitiba, Brazil, making any matchup between the two impossible. While still unlikely to happen, the fact that Silva is now based in the U.S. has at least opened the window a little.

• Dan Henderson vs. Matt Lindland

Yes, we know that Henderson helps run the Team Quest franchise in California while Lindland helps run the franchise in Oregon. But what if the two Olympic silver medalists weren’t affiliated and had a beef? That would be one hell of a showdown between two dudes with some serious cauliflower ear.

• Anderson Silva vs. Paulo Filho

Another forbidden matchup between friends. But what if they weren’t training partners and didn’t have the same manager, Eddie Suarez? It would feature the best Muay Thai striker in the middleweight division against the best Jiu-Jitsu practitioner at 185 pounds. With both now fighting for Zuffa, there could be a lot of public pressure for the two to fight if Silva cleans out the UFC middleweight division and Filho accomplishes likewise in the WEC.

• Brock Lesnar vs. Fedor Emelianenko

Many still have questions about Lesnar following his quick win over Min Soo-kim at Dynamite USA!! on June 2, but we dare you to name a heavyweight out there with more upside potential. If Lesnar reaches that potential, he’ll be a legitimate challenger to Fedor and a match between the two could be epic.

• Kid Yamamoto vs. Urijah Faber

There are a lot of people who consider Urijah Faber the top 145-pound fighter in the world, and there are those who claim that distinction belongs to Kid Yamamoto. Despite Faber being in the WEC and Yamamoto being in K-1, the best two featherweights in the world seem destined to fight.

• The IFL vs. EliteXC

Despite a team-based format, the IFL will have champions in every weight class following the completion of its first-ever Grand Prix on December 29. IFL co-owner and commissioner Kurt Otto has gone on the record as saying he’s serious about having the respective winners of the IFL’s division GPs challenge another fi ght promotion in an IFLstyle best-of-five team showdown.

EliteXC live events president Gary Shaw is the only other major MMA promoter to express a willingness to work with competing fight promotions, so how about a head-to-head battle between them? If marketed right, the attention generated could help elevate both in the eyes of the mainstream, and could feature potential matchups such as Nick Diaz vs. Chris Horodecki, Jake Shields vs. Jay Hieron, and Murilo “Ninja” Rua vs. Benji Radach.

]]>http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12828-216/feed/0A Force of Naturehttp://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12816-215/
http://www.fightmagazine.com/mma-magazine/12816-215/#commentsThu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000Sam Sheridanhttp://www.fightmagazine.comBJ Penn seems to exist apart from other fi ghters. He does things that should be impossible, like moving up in weight and taking the belt, or being the only American to win Mundials (the world series of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) ever. And he looks ordinary, nondescript, with a smooth, seal-like body. My editor said, “Tell [...]

]]>BJ Penn seems to exist apart from other fi ghters. He does things that should be impossible, like moving up in weight and taking the belt, or being the only American to win Mundials (the world series of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) ever. And he looks ordinary, nondescript, with a smooth, seal-like body. My editor said, “Tell BJ to get running; for the cover photo, I want lean and mean BJ, not Buddha BJ.” He was joking, but I thought, I prefer Buddha BJ. As soon as you watch him start to move in the cage, you begin to understand why so many people believe BJ is the proven pound-for-pound best fi ghter in the world. It’s not his physique but his elegance, his rightness of movement. He’s a killer in there; he’s a shark in the water. And something about him transcends even that.

“Baby” Jay Dee Penn earned his nickname “The Prodigy” because while he only started learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in 1997, in 2000 he was the fi rst non-Brazilian black belt to win his weight class at Mundials. That’s insane. After three years of Jiu-Jitsu, most people will be a purple or, (if they’re athletic and dedicated, seven-days-a-week dudes) a brown belt. Regardless, the Mundials is a Brazilian playground, the best of the best. What BJ did; there’s something unnatural about it. It has the feel of one of those movies

where the leading kid fi nds a magic baseball glove and can suddenly pitch in the Majors.

BJ’s prodigious abilities served him well as he transitioned to MMA, and he continued to upset the order of the universe. His stand-up seems as good as his ground game. He blew through the Lightweight Division of the UFC, until he lost a close decision to Jens Pulver, mostly because he stood and tried to trade – on the ground he passed Jen’s guard like it was tissue paper. He rode Takanori Gomi, the “FireBall Kid,” (who later seemed unstoppable in Pride) like a pet pony. He moved up a weight class and choked out Matt Hughes, arguably the best fighter in the world. He even gave a good heavyweight all he could handle when he lost a tough decision to Ryoto Machida, who is undefeated (and at light heavyweight has beaten Stephen Bonnar, Sam Hoger, and Rich Franklin).

In more recent times, modern MMA caught up. Penn lost twice, first to Georges St. Pierre (in a split decision) and then to Matt Hughes in their rematch, with what looked like conditioning problems. His superlative abilities aren’t enough for him to dominate at 170 pounds anymore. Not without being in shape. But still, he could win any fi ght he’s in with the “BJ factor of unseemly amounts of talent. At any time he could pull off something sick and stand the world on its ear. The betting line in Vegas better account for it.

BUT WHAT MAKES BJ BJ?

I tracked down accomplished fighter and legendary grappler Dave Camarillo, the author of Guerilla Jiu-Jitsu. Dave had been around BJ from the beginning, at Ralph Gracie’s academy. Dave maintains that the primary thing that makes BJ great is the family support he has. “His father is a very driven, really positive guy,” said Camarillo. “He supported BJ in every way. BJ’s positive outlook is maybe his greatest strength.”

Additionally, Dave stated, “His initial development was just stupendous. You could see him technically growing by the hour. You’d catch him in something, and the next day it wouldn’t be there anymore.”

I asked David to describe BJ’s game to me. In Jiu-Jitsu, a fi ghter’s game is an individual style, a representation of his background and his teachers, but also a reflection of his own personality. “BJ controls you, he understands what you are doing and what you want to do, and he doesn’t let you do it. He takes you out of your game. For instance, I have a fast, attacking game and BJ slows me down.”

FIGHT! flew me to the town of Hilo, on the big island of Hawaii. I ended up sitting on the sidewalk outside of BJ’s gym, waiting for JD Penn, BJ’s older brother and manager. JD is also the founder of Rumble World and a Jiu-Jitsu black belt. JD had been training in Las Vegas with John Lewis; BJ had visited him and met Dana White.

It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon, the clouds huge and low, and Hilo felt quiet, a small town far away from anywhere, on the lip of a big ocean. The foliage was dank and green, and the air was wet with moisture and the smell of the tropics.

JD rolled up in a big truck, and said to me with a smile, “You’re here in time for the hurricane, huh?” It turned out that Hurricane Flossie, a category four storm, was bearing down on Hawaii, alarming the newscasters but not the locals. My first trip to Hawaii and I timed it perfectly. The next four days were rainy, threatening, and ominous as I tried to unlock the riddle of BJ.

On Monday morning, I caught a ride with JD down to the gym in time for BJ’s morning workout. BJ was down in the ring with Junior Tuyo, his friend, training partner, and conscience. You can say what you want, but BJ Penn isn’t physically intimidating. I looked right past him the first time, maybe because he was on his back doing sit-ups. But the more I was around him, the more attention I paid.

Junior is powerful, dark, covered with barely visible tattoos, and quiet but friendly. I think of him as BJ’s conscience because he wakes BJ up, and monitors his diet and workouts. The diet came from Tony Aponte, a sports nutritionist from Seattle. Like a lot of fighters, BJ sometimes has food issues. But now BJ has discovered the value of good nutrition. They worked out for the next three hours pretty steadily, and I joined them for some of it, but I was fighting a cold and didn’t want to pass it along.

HILO BOYS JUST SCRAP

After they got back from their final run, we jumped in Junior’s car to get lunch. Junior was driving, BJ was in the front seat and I was in the back. As we meandered through town, I asked BJ about Hilo.

BJ smiled like the sun coming out. There are two different BJs: if he likes the topic, and thinks it is funny, he is wreathed in smiles. If he doesn’t want to talk about it, his face closes down. He’s not a hard guy to read.

“Hilo?” he asked, turning to me in the backseat, “Hilo is such a small place, eh?

You’re gonna see everyone again and again. If you got a problem with somebody, you can’t escape it.” His Hawaiian drawl nearly disappears when he is talking to me, but comes back strong when talking to his friends and neighbors – which is everyone. Everyone we see on the street or in the gym gives BJ the shaka, the hang-loose Hawaiian salute, and he returns it, bradda.

BJ spins some tales of street fights that happened when he was younger, 15 or 16, and it becomes apparent that the thing to do in Hilo is fight. “I fought on every stop at that beach over there,” he says in passing, and launches into a convoluted

story about a brawl with a guy who’s now on Death Row in Oahu for multiple murders. “It was about pride, sure, but it was just fun, you know? Just a rush.” Anybody who produced a knife or a gun was from out of town; Hilo boys would fi ght and get over it.

You’d fight the same guy several times – I fought one guy five times – but everybody knows everybody, so you’d find out the next day that the guy was your cousin or something.” His face lights up in a huge, Buddha-esque grin, and his eyes nearly vanish in the smile. That’s the Hilo way – just scrap.

Dave Camarillo’s words had planted a seed, and I wanted to find out what I could about the Penn family. BJ’s parents very kindly agreed to talk to me one morning (the day the hurricane was supposed to hit) at their lovely house overlooking Hilo bay. The clouds were low on the trees, and we sat on the porch and listened to the rain come and go. His father is white and his mother is native Hawaiian. They are both self-made people, very strong and assertive. I could see what Dave had been talking about; they were positive and powerful. Supportive, too; they both were wearing the new BJ Penn t-shirt, like any proud parents might.

BJ’s mother was one of seven sisters – the daughter of lei sellers (sellers of welcoming flowers to tourists) – and the only one to put herself through college. She is now the Director of the USDA for the Western Pacific, and helps developing rural communities, which is her way of giving back to the community. BJ’s father was from Kansas, and had passed through Hawaii in 1964 in the service, and when he got out of the military he came back. They have been very successful entrepreneurs, and have a powerful sense of family. “We worked together in all kinds of things, oil, rental cars, real estate…and we bring in our sons on everything, so they understand it, and have to work.” They are a team; the whole family is involved.

They love to talk about their boys, and it became apparent that BJ isn’t the only Jiu-Jitsu prodigy; all four brothers are black belts, and JD and Reagan are extremely good – maybe more technical than Baby Jay. His mom said with a warm smile, “My boys have the killer instinct. But when they’re not competing, they’re very humble.”

I listened to the family legend (every family has its own legends) about how BJ and the brothers found Jiu-Jitsu. BJ was a wrestling fanatic, maybe from birth, and his heroes were Rocky and Hulk Hogan. He would read wrestling magazines at four years old, and prove he’d read them, in order to get more. He would watch Rocky movies and take the hits with Rocky on the couch, reacting to every blow.

The brothers watched the 2nd UFC and decided they were fighters, and they’d all box or wrestle in the front yard. A man moved in down the block, Tom Callos, who’d studied with Ralph Gracie. He was gearing up for his 5th dan Tae Kwon Do test. He asked BJ’s dad if the kids could come train with him, and BJ declined because, “I already thought I was the best fi ghter in the world.”

BJ fi nally agreed to train with Tom, and he realized quickly that with Jiu-Jitsu he could beat everyone in Hilo (he was in the full swing of street-fi ghting) and rule the town. Tom, to his credit, saw that he had something special on his hands, and cajoled BJ into coming to train with Ralph Gracie for a week in Mountain,Ca. BJ thought he was going to crush Ralph; he’d been training for a few months and had it mastered. But when Ralph beat him, a whole world opened up. Ralph also saw the potential, and talked to BJ’s dad.

Eventually BJ ended up going to Ralph’s gym in Oakland. BJ was nervous about flying and living on the mainland alone, so far from the town he loved. But on the plane a thought crept into his head, this might be what I do. “Other kids did four years in college, I did my education in Jiu-Jitsu,” BJ says, and credits Ralph with giving him great technique and fundamentals.

The Penns are Jiu-Jitsu savants, through some combination of encyclopedic memory and body knowledge, coupled with natural strength and flexibility. They’re just much better, much more quickly, than the average person.

By all accounts, it’s a randomly occurring genius, sprung like Athena from the forehead of a God. Sure, you can break it down into its component parts: BJ is fast, strong, agile, and has tremendous flexibility. Eddie Bravo has said BJ is so strong that his tendons must be outsized; he has “chimpanzee tendons.” But BJ is better than a sum of his parts.

NEW MOTIVATION

The truth is, BJ is just really good at this, at manipulating his body and his opponent’s. He has a great feel for it. I’d spoken to Jens Pulver earlier, the man who’d beaten BJ the first time but just lost the rematch. Jens had said admiringly, “BJ – what makes him great is that his natural instincts are sick. When it all goes upside down, the fi ght turns into a mad firefight, his instincts are top-notch. He does the right thing.”

But there’s much more to the story than that, however neat it may appear. How many basketball players were as quick and coordinated as Michael Jordan? Not many, but there were some out there, and they never came close to Michael, because to go with the physical gifts, Michael had the work ethic, the will to win, the relentless drive to improve his game, to study tape, to beat his man. BJ has that drive. Some of it comes from his upbringing. His parents are winners and want their kids to be winners. Some of it comes from Hilo, where you can’t ever back down from a fight. But some of it is self-created, from inside a kid who dressed up like Rocky and reacted to the punches.

Fight commentators will look for the easy handle on a fighter, like poverty is the thing that makes a fighter hungry. But the truth is, pressure and fire can come from all kinds of different places; young Cassius Clay was solid middle class.

In the gym, BJ is always watching. He sees everything. Even when he seems to be giving you his full attention, he’s aware of the way other people are rolling and what they’re doing. His parents tell stories of BJ studying Jiu-Jitsu tapes for ten to fourteen hours a day, of his intense discipline – banging pots and pans together to wake his brother up for training. BJ presents to the world a guy who is a natural, but it is obvious that coming up, he drilled and worked and trained Jiu-Jitsu like a man possessed. He said, “Before I couldn’t do anything but think about Jiu-Jitsu all day, lying in bed, in the shower…this goes to this goes to that… but that doesn’t happen anymore. I’m glad. I don’t want to go back to that level of obsession.”

Watching BJ roll, his agility is apparent, and what is also striking are how educated his feet and legs seem, like another pair of hands, searching out and clinging to the right spots. Boxers talk about an “educated jab” that can do a lot of things – BJ has educated feet.

Joe Lauzon, a fighter who was coached by BJ on the SpikeTV show, had told me, “BJ has such complete faith in everything he does, he doesn’t do anything half-assed…he kept showing us different sweeps or moves, and each one was ’the best’ move he had. To BJ, each move can be, and is, the best move at the right time.”

BJ’s striking coach, Rudy Valentino, said, “With every fi ght he learns something new and applies it in his next fight. BJ rolls with beginners sometimes, because when you analyze their weaknesses in a fresh way, you can apply it to others.”

BJ’S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG

Tony Desouza is a friend and training partner to BJ, and was his wrestling coach on the SpikeTV show. I know Tony from Brazil, when he was a wandering ronin. I asked Tony about BJ’s game, what he thought of it. Tony squinted and pondered, and then said, “He’s always searching for ways to improve; physically, mentally, spiritually.”

The physical ways are instantly apparent; BJ is in shape. On Monday mornings, Junior wakes BJ up and drives him to the gym. They work out, pretty steadily, from eight in the morning until after eleven; weights, bag work, roadwork. The night I was there, BJ came in at five, and did his “fight-gone-bad” drills: three five minute rounds, broken into a minute on the mitts with Rudy, a minute grappling with whomever was in the cage, then back to the mitts. After that, BJ taught the gi class, and rolled pretty hard with his brother Regan for three or four rounds. He’s keeping a schedule like that four days a week, with two lighter days and a day of rest. That’s not so bad for an elite professional MMA fighter, you say. But this is more than ninety days out from his next fight. He’s made it his way of life now, staying in shape.

In the past, BJ was notorious; he’d work out for thirty minutes every other day, and go fight Renzo or whomever, relying on his superlative skills and instincts. He was partying and surfing. It caught up to him in the shape of Georges St. Pierre and his Hughes rematch. So BJ decided to change his life – he took it on himself. He said, “You know that guy that comes in the gym that doesn’t know anything, but he’s just a beast: strong and fast and really hard to handle? I want to be like that guy, but with knowledge.”

I asked BJ the inevitable question: who do you want next? And I got the answer I expected. First Sherk, the lightweight title, and then back to the welterweight title and Hughes or GSP or Serra, whomever. I nod judiciously, why not?

Pat Miletich, the legendary trainer who had prepared both Matt Hughes and Jens Pulver to fi ght BJ, had said, “the thing about BJ is that he’s extremely dangerous early on: he’s so gifted, so good on the ground. But if you can survive the onslaught, and push him into the second or third round, you can start to dictate the pace.” BJ and Junior are shutting that door hard. And if your strategy in fighting BJ is to hope that he’s out of shape, what will you do now?

Rudy Valentino is BJ’s striking coach, but he is also a lot more. Rudy’s a compact man with a neat mustache, and a universe of experience behind him. He told me that he wasn’t so concerned with BJ’s striking, he was focused on BJ’s spirit. “Every warrior in history is tied to his roots, to the land. It’s about identity, knowing who you are, and it makes you strong. I’m here to make BJ a better man.”

SPIRITUAL PROGRESS

Rudy has trained martial arts since he was five, was raised in Kenpo by some of the American originators, and he lived in Thailand in the seventies to train Muay Thai. He’s trained seven World Champion fi ghters. He’s also a historian, who works for the Department of Parks and Recreation, and he reads everything; he’s writing a book. He’s a former pro surfer who is now surfing professionally again. During the hurricane swell he went out and rode the thirty-foot waves, and when someone joked with him about how risky it was, he smiled and shrugged, “If that’s how I go, so be it,” and his eyes were calm and wise. You don’t have to be just one thing.

I watched him coach, and was satisfied; he’s the real deal. He knows, down through his bones, what he’s talking about. We talked about BJ’s spiritual growth, and this is where BJ has made the most progress. Rudy said, “Yeah, BJ learns very fast, but he was immature, his mind needed to be trained. He’s stronger now.” Rudy considers his role in helping BJ’s mental and spiritual state more important than the physical. The way he’s doing it is by making BJ aware of his roots.

Rudy talked a little bit about the “Aloha spirit,” which may sound like a Hawaiian cliché but is very real. The spirit is about being open and giving, about generosity and helping others, and is still alive in Hawaii, on the big island. Being friendly and helpful, being a good person. That’s what makes a great fighter great.

I see it demonstrated in the amount of time BJ will give to fans that stop by – basically, as much as they want. He takes some little girls down to the cage and poses for fi fteen minutes with them, and chats with their mother. He teaches night classes; he really gets out there and teaches. He takes time with me, to try and explain himself. He feels connected to Hilo, to Hawaii.

In the second Pulver fi ght, BJ used an ancient Hawaiian technique called the Huki that’s a version of the trip-takedown that isolates an arm. He’s reading books about his Hawaiian culture. He’s very aware of where he’s from, he’s aware that he’s got responsibilities as a role-model.

In Hawaiian legends, when a warrior defeated another, he might eat his enemies heart, and thus take on his mana, his spirit – and the spirits of all those his enemy had vanquished. It’s a lot like a fi ghter. When he beats someone, he takes their legend, everyone they beat, and weaves it into his own. When BJ beat Matt Hughes for the fi rst time, he took some of Matt Hughes’ legend. With the rematch, Matt took it back. But with this wiser, stronger, more mature BJ, anyone who stands in the cage with him will have their mana woven into his. He’s in shape, his mind is right, and there’s always the